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May 21, 2009

Learning and Teaching: Do we have these right?

One of my greatest complaints about modern American education is the extent to which it has subverted what I think is the normal way in which people learn. It does this in the interest of efficiency, getting the greatest number of students through the requisite number of subjects/courses in the least amount of time. The modern formal schooling system is a product of education engineering with the objective of maximum efficiency subsuming the quality of educational outcomes.

The resulting structure and functional operation of schools (K-12) and colleges reflect the factory assembly line approach along with the specialist (disciplinarian) fragmentation of knowledge for easy application. Students are products.

And the frustrating part of this is that there is a lot of psychological and neurological research that explicated how people actually learn best. An excellent resource is the National Academies Press:
"How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School", John Branford, Ann L. Brown, and Rodney R. Cocking, editors. The book may be read on-line for free at: books.nap.edu. Look in the lower left corner of the window to see the link to the on-line version.

There are many other resources on this topic. Most of the physchologists who have been investigating learning theory, intelligence, and so on, have devoted some of their efforts to the implications of their findings to education (see list at end for just a few).

Children come into this world with an insatiable desire to understand all that goes on around them. This is the strength of our species. We are driven to learn everything we can because there is no way to know what will be important to know that will ensure our survival and thriving. Our brains have evolved to acquire every bit of knowledge we can get as it pertains to three major questions:

What all is in the world and how does it all work?

How did the world get the way I find it?

Who am I and what is my place in this world?

The child (in all of us) asks: "Why?" and for every answer ("because...") there is the inevitable follow-on "But why?".

The world, here, means the world of our immediate surroundings. As we grow and as our world expands the same questions prevail but the complexities increase commensurably. For many people there is a natural limit to the scope of the world with which they can contend. This is neither right or wrong. It just reflects the diversity of mental competencies in our population.

These questions are both our blessing and our curse. They are the result of our evolved mode of survival requiring us to learn how things really work. But that is also why we are so successful adapting to virtually any environment. When we understand how things work (including those others around us) we are in a position to manipulate our environment so as to maximize our potential for survival and procreation. That we need to learn these things (as opposed to them being hard coded in our brains by evolution, like instincts) means we have maximum flexibility in adapting to anything, but it also puts a heavy burden on our child rearing. Twenty-five thousand years ago this wasn't as problematic as it is today. Tribes were able to exploit many different physical environments, but children learned the peculiarities of their particular environments (say Eskimo children in contrast to Middle Eastern children) and cultures without extensive effort. That is their learning how to get along in their world wasn't particularly burdensome (though maybe sometimes dangerous!). Rather learning to be a member of a world, how to operate effectively in that world, and have a sense of purpose is just simply natural, up to those mentioned limits.

That is, it is natural as long as the world is comprehensible to the ordinary human mind. And it is not an effort as long as those trying to assist them in learning are not making matters worse by breaking the world up into discrete and seemingly unconnected pieces, expecting the learner to absorb the subject with no real motivational context.

The modern world has become literally incomprehensible to most people. It is complex, it is racing pelpell mell twenty-four hours, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, every year. Worse yet, every year the pace is accelerating. Couple this with our attempts to make it a least a little comprehensible by parsing it into circumscribed domains that can be studied in their own right without reference to how everything else is impacted. The world is a large, very complex system where all subsystems affect one another in some way, even if weakly and through time delays. Yet we have succeeded in breaking it up into parts and effectively isolating each in the interest of forcing individuals to 'specialize' in one little part. And all for the sake of efficiency and the belief that no one human could possibly understand the big picture.

Well we reap what we sow.

Now we live in a world that is more interconnected than at any time in history. It is more complex, faster paced and because we have done such a good job of disciplinizing everyone (in developed world cultures anyway) no one understands the whole anymore. Not even our leaders have a clue, which is why they struggle mightily to figure out how to make things work and just continue to muck things up.

People will learn, and have a tremendous capacity to learn, that which helps them answer the above questions. They do not need to learn excruciating details about every subject that is out there. But they do need to learn some fundamental basics (my call for systems science as the core of general education is meant to provide this framework for learning about the world). They need to be able to understand the world as an integrated whole. They need to grasp the basics of important science findings like the Second Law of Thermodynamics and Evolution.

Which brings me to the other side of this issue of education: teaching. We have made a fundamental mistake in how we conceive of teaching as a power relation between one who knows (the teacher) and therefore has the power and the one who needs to learn and is therefor in an almost subservient role. Rather than the dynamic being one of student approaching the teacher with a definite learning objective in mind and asking for guidance, the teacher in our system tells the student what they should learn and then rewards or punishes them for succeeding or failing (according to the teacher's criteria). This might sound efficient and gets the job done but it completely subverts the natural tendency for people to want to learn that which they have found to be missing from their understanding.

Our system is based on regimenting subjects, packaging them in modules for efficient consumption, dictating when, where, and how they are to be mastered. Starting with the so-called basics, reading, writing, and arithmetic, we push our children into training regimens rather than let them discover a desire to acquire the needed skills and then helping them construct those skills at their own pace. It has been known for many years that young children are far more receptive to learning math facts when they perceive they need those facts in order to accomplish some other goal. It has been shown that retention of facts and skills is much greater when learned in the context of achieving a desired goal than when presented as something to be learned for its own sake. For example, children learning something of the history of their own families (genealogies) remembered historical facts that played into the context of what their ancestors were doing at the time better than a group of children simply trying to memorize those same historical facts.

Over the years I have developed a very different view of what teaching should be as compared to what it is typically thought. I no longer see myself as a giver of knowledge as, rather, a guide to understanding. My job is to point naive learners toward the key points that will allow them to then take responsibility for discovering and constructing their own knowledge. Of course the question of veracity of what they construct is always there. After all, they may make mistakes in learning (as we all do from time to time!) and they may need critical review to set them on a more correct path. This is certainly the case in technical, mathematical, and scientific realms where there are such things as 'right' answers. But the order in which they manage to construct their knowledge, and ultimately their understanding, is much less critical to the success of the overall enterprise. I will never forget my own experience of struggling with calculus (I did OK but it was hard) studied in an essential vacuum of purpose (you can't call the silly little isolated word problems as motivators) and then taking calculus-based physics where, as if by magic, I found myself 'learning' calculus. It was magical. All that math made so much more sense in the context of real dynamics.

This raises the issue of courses and summative assessment as the main forms of evaluation and quality control (as in the industrial product sense). Courses are the way we package these modules of knowledge and we use testing, sometimes standardized testing, to determine if students are absorbing the material appropriately. The problem with this whole idea is that students quickly learn to game the system. They get that what will advance them, and get them praise, is simply storing the requisite subjects (mostly facts and figures) long enough to regurgitate on a test. They have no sense, generally, that the subject in the course has any particular relationship with themselves or anything else in life. Too often the subject seems, at best, like a conglomeration of interesting but disjoint facts that characterize that one subject.

What makes things worse is that we expect subjects to be taught by experts in that subject. This is especially true at the college level. Of course specialists are going to focus on the facts of their specialty and rarely are concerned with their subject's relations with the rest of the world. And they will tend to teach the subject in a manner geared to turn the student into a specialist in the same subject. As long as everyone buys into the notion that each person HAS to specialize in order to get a job (and do a good job because they are experts) then this seems like a perfectly acceptable, even natural, approach. Professional schools are predicated on the idea that we need to, very early, mold people into specialists who will be hitting the ground running when the graduate.

People do, eventually, need to settle down to become expert in one or a few disciplines. But I suspect it could best be accomplished later in their lives (twenties and beyond) rather than earlier. If I am right about the role that could be played by systems science in education then by the time people reached their majority they would have developed some pretty good understanding of the three issues that drive human curiosity listed above. They could then spend the rest of their lives refining their understanding from one or more perspectives without being lost in any subject just because they need it for their job.

In the end, our education system, our concepts about learning, and about teaching, have all been shaped by the belief that education's primary role is getting people ready for their working life. It used to be that higher education was about getting people ready to be thoughtful citizens. But these days the idea of a citizen is someone who does a good job, spends money on stuff, and occasionally votes for someone they assume knows more than they do. This shift in our purposes for education, this shift in our thinking about the value of education is partly the reason we are in the particular jam we are in now.

Teaching should be providing resources, examples, guidance, and, most of all, moral support. Our children and young adult learners should not be forced into molds or dictated to as to what they should find interesting or worthy of intellectual pursuit or skill development. Learning should be the most exalted activity and students should be praised for their accomplishments even when those accomplishments have nothing to do with passing some standardized test. Learners should be elevated to the status of HUMAN and afforded the opportunity to do what they would naturally do. We are inquisitive, we are retentive of meaningful knowledge, we are motivated to understand and grasp meaning. Unfortunately the modern version of school pretty much beats it out of us by the time we're eighteen years old. What a pitiful situation we've created.

Comments

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The UK education system has all the failings you describe George...what semblance of non-vocational unstressed teaching that existed has been destroyed by the Target-measuring-blame culture of corporate neoliberalism which has been embraced by all UK governments of the last 25 years....and its obsession with control and monatarisation is falling apart like a cheap watch...but then what isnt?
My grandfather worked in a shipyard had no qualifications, yet he had skills in metalworking which very few people could match today. He could create garden gates, railings, utensials, car body panels every bit as good as the professionals...he had that magical and mystical co-ordination of eye, hand and brain which no academic testing procedure could quantify-he was also a fine gardener and an convincing amateur philosopher! Craftsmen, artists, guilds associations, 'uneducated' men who could barely read, created the gothic cathedrals of Europe which have lasted a thousand years.
Any rational sapience system must recognise nurture and encourage these type of undervalued talents in all people. I work in a UK university, I deal with professors and doctors of science..I am constantly amazed at their lack of insight/interest in subjects beyond their specialisms...they prefer to burrow in effete, increasingly irrelevent research (immotality symbolism)
I have a lot more respect for my old (sadly departed)grandads wisdom and humanity than the lot of them put together!

I have a shrewd feeling George knows these supressed feelings of 'colleagual dispair' all too well.